: he was conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in
his own experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy.
Dorothea, he said to himself, was for ever enthroned in his soul: no other woman
could sit higher than her footstool; and if he could have written out in
immortal syllables the effect she wrought within him, he might have boasted
after the example of old Drayton, that -
 
»Queens hereafter might be glad to live
Upon the alms of her superfluous praise.«
 
But this result was questionable. And what else could he do for Dorothea? What
was his devotion worth to her? It was impossible to tell. He would not go out of
her reach. He saw no creature among her friends to whom he could believe that
she spoke with the same simple confidence as to him. She had once said that she
would like him to stay; and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might
hiss around her.
    This had always been the conclusion of Will's hesitations. But he was not
without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own resolve. He had
often got irritated, as he was on this particular night, by some outside
demonstration that his public exertions with Mr. Brooke as a chief could not
seem as heroic as he would like them to be, and this was always associated with
the other ground of irritation - that notwithstanding his sacrifice of dignity
for Dorothea's sake, he could hardly ever see her. Whereupon, not being able to
contradict these unpleasant facts, he contradicted his own strongest bias and
said, »I am a fool.«
    Nevertheless, since the inward debate necessarily turned on Dorothea, he
ended, as he had done before, only by getting a livelier sense of what her
presence would be to him; and suddenly reflecting that the morrow would be
Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church and see her. He slept upon that
idea, but when he was dressing in the rational morning light, Objection said -
    »That will be a virtual defiance of Mr. Casaubon's prohibition to visit
Lowick, and Dorothea will be displeased.«
    »Nonsense!« argued Inclination, »it would be too monstrous for him to hinder
me from going out to a pretty country church on a spring morning. And Dorothea
will be glad.«
    »It will be clear to Mr. Casaubon that you have come either to annoy him or
to see Dorothea.«
    »It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to see
Dorothea? Is he
